Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [8]
I was still unhappy in junior high school, but my solace was swimming with the team. Making friends with them wasn’t easy. When I swam on the team in New Hampshire, we took time to hang on to the walls and talk. The swimmers on the Phillips 66 team were so much more intense, even in lane two. No one stopped in the middle of a set and talked. No one suddenly did a somersault just for fun. Everyone was serious. Worse than that, I was always the last one to finish in lane two. It was very discouraging, but one day when Coach Gambril came by to check on the swimmers in my lane, he figured out what I was doing wrong. He had us doing a series of thirty one-hundred-meter drills in one minute and forty-five-second intervals. This meant that we were supposed to swim two laps of the pool, check our time, and begin swimming again when the hands of the pace clock at the edge of the pool hit the one-minute-and-forty-five-second mark. Most of the swimmers got ten seconds’ rest.
Coach Gambril stopped me and asked, “What was your time for your last one hundred?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
He looked like he was going to get mad. “Didn’t I tell you that you have to keep track of your times during workouts, so you know how you’re doing? Well, then, why didn’t you get it?”
“I never have time to stop. I had to keep going so I could stay up with the other kids,” I said.
“You mean to say that for the last six months you’ve been swimming through every one of these workouts without taking any rest?”
I nodded, sure that I was in big trouble.
He shook his head and sighed. “I’m so sorry; I should have been watching you more closely. It’s okay for you to stop. You need to take a break between each one hundred or two hundred, whatever we’re doing. From now on, I want you to take at least ten seconds’ rest.”
I looked down at the water, afraid that he wouldn’t understand.
“What’s wrong?” His voice softened.
“If I do that, I’ll be even farther behind the other swimmers.” I hated to be behind.
“That’s okay; by resting and working each set harder, you’ll get stronger. If the kids are doing a set of ten one hundreds or ten two hundreds, just do eight. If you train with more intensity, you will get faster, and I’ll bet it won’t be long before you are the lead swimmer in the lane,” he reassured me.
I could tell he cared about me, and he knew what he was doing, so I followed what he said.
He was right: within a few months, I was the lead swimmer in my lane. Still, it was only lane two. I wanted to continue improving, but I wasn’t sure what it took to become faster.
During workouts, Coach Gambril had our top swimmers demonstrate their strokes for us, to show the techniques they used to move through the water. Sometimes we watched films with stroke analysis, but seeing the swimmers in the water with us made it so much easier to understand.
From lane two I began watching Hans and Gunnar, trying to see what they were doing so I could imitate them. It was obvious that they worked out with incredible intensity. Everything they did got their fullest effort. They never cruised through workouts or just got by. It was amazing that they could push themselves so hard. I didn’t fully understand it. I didn’t know that they were pushing through the pain and fatigue barriers; I was just trying to complete the workouts. But one day I asked one of the top breaststroke swimmers in the nation why she was so fast. She said that she worked hard on every lap, every single day. The message about what it takes to be the best became clearer.
During one workout, Coach Gambril made a “deal” with Hans: if Hans could swim the mile race under a specific time, the whole team could get out of the water early. Hans agreed to the deal. We all moved to lane five, where the water was calmer. Half the team stood in lane four, the other half in lane six, preparing to cheer him on.
Hans climbed out onto the pool deck, walked around, shook his arms, and psyched himself up so much that he hyperventilated and collapsed on